


of all my demon spirits [META]

by thesepossessedbylight



Series: of all my demon spirits (I need you the most) [2]
Category: House of Cards (US TV), The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-23 16:46:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11406459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesepossessedbylight/pseuds/thesepossessedbylight
Summary: These are my notes written for my Stella Gibson/Reed Smith piece 'of all my demon spirits (I need you the most)'. In here I discuss my opinions about Stella Gibson's character, both as a character and as she's been written by The Fall's writers.





	of all my demon spirits [META]

These notes are generally about my theory of Stella’s sexuality. She’s shown as having sex with two men (Jimmy Olson and Tom Anderson) and, except for the fact that Reed decided not to, she would have had sex with one woman (Reed). This makes a sizeable argument in favour of Stella being bisexual. Unfortunately, I think it’s significantly more nuanced than this. There’s two aspects to this: the text (by which I mean the tv series itself, and the writers’ decisions therein) and the character (Stella herself).

Let’s look first at the text. Stella has explicit sex with Jimmy Olson and - I think; as far as I can remember - with Tom Anderson. She is shown post-coital with both. The show writers are clearly not afraid of violence or sex: the show has an R18 rating (at least in New Zealand) and both the violence and sex in the series is fairly explicit. However, the writers stop short of showing Stella and Reed having sex. Why? Is it the old misogynist chestnut that two women giving each other pleasure warrants a far higher rating than a man seeking his pleasure in a woman? Possibly; given that they’re already at an R18 rating I doubt they could afford to go higher (and we all know the rating debacle that But I Want To Be A Cheerleader! experienced). So maybe it’s a ratings thing. It could alternatively be that they needed some segue into the Burns-and-Spector-in-Stella’s-room scene, and that Reed and Stella having sex would have complicated this. But there’s no real reason why the narrative has to be the way it is; it could have been changed, without necessarily jeopardising the forward movement of the story. The other explanation could have been that because Reed is married, she would be unwilling to consider having extra-marital sex, whether with a woman or with a man. This is relatively compelling, except that if this was the case, why wait until the supremely awkward elevator scene to signal this? Further, the glances between the two women while they’re still sitting at the bar is a clear indication that Reed is interested. There’s literally no other way to read that. Again, why wait until the elevator scene for Reed to refuse? Why not have her come to herself while at the bar and gently move away from Stella? In the absence of a more compelling analysis of the writers’ intention I’m forced to suspect that it’s plain old lesbophobia and an unwillingness to show two women’s pleasure.

Let’s talk about Stella’s character. She’s portrayed as competent, holding both herself and her staff to high standards, with little patience for fuck-ups. She’s exceptionally private, and it’s often difficult to read her emotions in her expressions. The exception to this is that sometimes she gets this oddly fragile look on her face, and it’s made clear from Gillian Anderson’s acting that Stella feels emotions very deeply, but often chooses not to express them. So far, so good.  
She’s also portrayed as sexually liberated, having sex with Jimmy Olson and Tom Anderson. However, this is more complicated than it might first appear. While having sex with Olson, he tries to extend his hands to touch her: she moves them away from her and pins them at his side. It’s clear that he reads this as kinky, although it’s probably fair to say that she doesn’t. As regards sex with Anderson, we’re never actually shown them having sex, so it’s unclear whether she reacts the same way. Both men, though, are younger than Stella, and less senior in the PSNI. Further, once the brief relationship is over, both men react the same way: Olson sends Stella repetitive, cloying texts [and possibly dick pics? Not sure but I wouldn’t put it past him ha]; Anderson turns on Stella, accusing her of caring for Spector more than him purely because she saves Spector once wounded, rather than Anderson. Stella is shown to have a high need for her relationships with men to be under her own control, which, while understandable, is a clear departure from most relationships on-screen. In contrast, Stella does not appear to have the same attitude with regards to her potential relationship with Reed. Maybe this is because it wasn’t developed so far on screen, but it could also be that Stella views men as okay partners for sex, but not for relationships, while she is more attracted to women for both relationships and sex.

There’s another complication: Stella’s comment in season 1, “Man fucks woman. Subject verb object. That’s ok. Woman fucks man. Woman subject, man object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?” is deeply interesting to me because Stella can easily be viewed as the neoliberal ideal of a sexually liberated woman, up for sex whenever and, relatively speaking, with whomever. This quote undercuts that. The first part of this quote (“Man fucks woman. Subject verb object.”) is taken directly from Catherine McKinnon’s book _Toward a Feminist Theory of the State_ (1989). Catherine McKinnon was a feminist who worked very closely with Andrea Dworkin on the first anti-pornography law (which focused on pornography as causing harm. This was in direct contrast to the cycle of Supreme Court cases which held that porn is protected under free speech laws). McKinnon, like Dworkin, was hardly a neoliberal fun-feminist, [Towards a Feminist Theory of the State explicitly uses Marxism as a jumping-off point for discussion, so she’s directly opposed to neoliberal anything] and the fact that Stella knows this quote well enough to be able to pull it out and extend it to make her point at a moment’s notice suggests that she’s fairly conversant with academic feminist thought. She might not be so conversant with this if she wasn’t deeply politically committed to feminism - ie, if she was only peripherally interested in feminism and/or only used it to further her own ends. This in turn suggests that she’s a woman with very deeply held political beliefs and personal principles: this much is shown in her near-obsession with catching Spector and bringing him to justice, but it further proves that this extends into her personal life, which the series doesn’t show as much.

Also: the character, Claire, whom Stella nearly has sex with in the third-to-last vignette, may or may not be Claire Underwood, of House of Cards. I’ve secretly headcanoned Claire as probably bi since Chapter 10, where she visits the artist (what’s his name - Adam Galloway) and there’s a brief shot of her dancing with another woman. Let’s ignore Galloway or Tom Yates or Francis, or the fact that that shot is coded so that the audience is complicit in viewing it through the male gaze; Claire needs a girlfriend! [also: help, now I ship Claire/Stella like SO MUCH. why do i do this to myself]. I shipped her with Stella because if my analysis of Stella above is correct, Stella holds herself to fairly rigid political and moral standards; Claire is not quite as rigid like this. I thought it would be interesting to see these two together, so similar yet so different in outlook and political worldview.  
Anyway, no copyright is intended; any characters or dialogue you recognise are the intellectual property of Netflix [Claire], Allan Cubitt and BBC Northern Ireland [Stella, Reed, all dialogue that’s quotes from the series]. Don’t sue me; fanworks are permitted under the transformative works copyright doctrine.


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